Jenna Price | Could this awful kiss actually change our lives for the better?

The head of the Spanish football federation Luis Rubiales kissing midfielder and star playmaker Jenni Hermoso straight after La Roja defeated the British Lionesses 1-0 in the FIFA Women's World Cup.

Kissing sounds consensual. Sweet. Affectionate. But this was the kiss felt around the world, a glorious victory for the Spanish women despoiled by a man thinking he was God's gift to women footballers.

But the way we felt it, the way we experienced it, very much depended on who we were, where we were and what we thought about a woman's right to her own body. Whether we consider it is perfectly ok to touch other people intimately without consent. Whether we think it's a joke and look at her, she's ok. Look at her! She's laughing! She's fine!

(Spoiler, she's not fine. She's just trying to behave in the way you've always expected her to behave.)

And maybe, your view depends on whether you've experienced this kind of thing yourself. The other night on ABC's The Drum, host Julia Baird revealed that when she was a newspaper cadet, one of her bosses got into the lift with her, "took my head and just planted a kiss on me, middle of the working day" and then got out of the lift. She never said anything until decades after the event.

But here's the thing. What if this particular act, watched by an estimated two billion people globally, changed our lives. What if the huge furore, the lies and the bullying, the threats and deflections which we now know to be untrue, shift our understanding of what it's like for women at work?

No question. This was workplace sexual harassment. She was at work. He was her boss (sure, she has a club football boss as well). Wrong on every level. And it happened in front of us all. That's when change happens. Here in Australia, when Luke Batty was murdered by his father in public view, Luke's brave mother Rosie started talking about what it was like to be a victim of family violence.

And she kept talking and talking and talking. Talking above the ignorant and the angry. She just kept talking.

Batty sees this incident as the living embodiment of male entitlement.

"It gives public space and witness to those unwanted advances. Generations of women tolerate, accept, make excuses for and brush it off while thinking, 'is there something wrong with us?'."

She's absolutely right. We ask ourselves whether we are overreacting. Then we feel conflicted about calling out bad behaviour, especially women of our generation (Batty and I are just five years apart).

But she's also really delighted that younger women are calling it out quickly and often: "Things have changed and we no longer accept it."

After Luke's murder in the public view, we started to pay attention, to understand what family violence was really like. There could be no deflection, no "other version" of events because it happened in plain view.

We all know the range of excuses for appalling male behaviour.

She's got no sense of humour. I didn't mean anything by it. It was harmless. I didn't mean it that way. And we also know that women don't report half the stuff that happens to them, from workplace sexual harassment to injuries inflicted by intimate partners.

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But here's the fascinating thing. Because Hermoso and Rubiales were at work in Australia (I know you think sport looks like fun but that's because you don't do it for a living), there could be a groundbreaking next chapter.

I'm going to get technical in the next paragraph but hold on!

Hermoso could file a complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, a workplace sexual harassment complaint, under provision 28B. Now, a person sexually harasses if he* engages in "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature in relation to the person harassed ...

"in circumstances in which a reasonable person, having regard to all the circumstances, would have anticipated the possibility that the person harassed would be offended, humiliated or intimidated."

Or ALL THREE!

"Yes!" says Belinda Smith, a senior academic in labour law at the University of Sydney. She says it is quite clear that Rubiales denied Hermoso the briefest moment to have any agency or capacity to say no.

"Yes, we could all look at that video and go ick ick ick," says Smith.

In Australia, only victims can take complaints to the Australian Human Rights Commission, says Smith.

Should we mount a campaign to get Hermoso to take Rubiales to the AHRC? Smith hoses me down. She can't imagine the case progressing in Australia because, doh, they aren't here, in Australia. And I'm guessing they would rather be in Spain and the AHRC would also try to get these two to conciliate.

So there is only one thing to do. That's to keep the pressure on Rubiales to resign. I mean, he's been suspended for 90 days but I'm guessing the federation thinks our concentration only lasts that long. Haha. They have no idea, do they?

Smith says that's one good thing to come out of all this mayhem. She says that even five years ago, this kind of behaviour would have gone unremarked. "I'm not Pollyanna-ish," says Smith, "but that's real change." (For those who don't know, Pollyanna was a fictional perpetually optimistic young girl)

And that real change means women like Julia Baird can speak up the minute it happens. That's progress.

*yeah, men harass in the workplace about a zillion times more than women. Don't get all defensive.